MAGA Brain

Republican voters are increasingly believing their own lies ... with predictable results

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up below.

A couple of quick housekeeping notes. I’ll be Zoom chatting tomorrow with friend of the newsletter Elliot Morris, data scientist and polling expert at the Economist. We’ll be talking midterms, the latest Economist election forecast, whether we should trust the polls, and his new book “Strength in Polls: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them.” We’ll be sitting down at 12:30, and the Zoom link is here.

Some personal news … I have a new gig! I’m now a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center For Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. I'll be working on a multi-year project examining the history of the war in Afghanistan. Our research will take a slightly different approach than other planned historical inquiries. We are focusing on the misguided assumptions — political, military, economic, cultural, and diplomatic — that drove the United States to spend more than $1 trillion and cost more than 2,400 American troops their lives in Afghanistan. We’ll look beyond what the United States got wrong in Afghanistan and focus instead on how we got things so wrong. We’ll focus far less on the 20 days that led to the US withdrawal in August 2021 and much more on the 20 years of mistakes that brought America to that tragic point.

So what does that mean for Truth and Consequences? I’m not sure yet, but my guess is not much. I love doing this newsletter. I love the interactions with all of you. I love the opportunity this platform gives me to write on so many topics of personal interest. If anything, since I’m likely to take a step back from some of my other writing gigs, I may end up writing more for the newsletter — and that may look like shorter, more focused pieces. So we will see what happens, but in the near term, you can expect more of the same from Truth and Consequences!

This Week In Republican Rake-Stepping

The last state primary of the year happened on Tuesday, and the results offer more bad news for Republicans. While Deleware and Rhode Island held elections, the most important results came in New Hampshire. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Senator Maggie Hassan might be the luckiest politician in the 2022 election cycle. Back in 2021, one could reasonably argue that she was the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the country. In 2016, she won her seat by a mere 1,017 votes against incumbent Kelly Ayotte. In February 2021, only 39 percent of voters thought Hassan deserved a second term, while 47 percent believed she didn’t. Then everything started going her way.

   In November 2021, the state’s popular incumbent governor, Chris Sununu, announced that he wouldn’t challenge Hassan. Ayotte made the same call that month. Ten months later, Republican primary voters had a choice between Chuck Morse, the president of the State Senate, and Don Bolduc, a MAGA-loving, pro-Trump, former general, who has never run for political office, denies that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and called for the abolishment of the FBI after the search of Trump’s home, Mar-a-Lago, last month. New Hampshire Republicans chose Bolduc, and now Hassan is favored to win a second term.

2. But there’s more! On the House side, in the New Hampshire Second District, pro-Trump Republican Bob Burns defeated Keene Mayor George Hansel, who had received Sununu’s endorsement. Burns’s win caused Cook Political Report to move the seat from a toss-up to “Lean Democratic.” In the other House race, 24-yeard old former White House aide Karoline Leavitt defeated 2020 nominee Matt Mowers, which significantly boosts the Democratic incumbent, Chris Pappas.

3. Here’s a look at the latest House ratings from the Cook Political Report. As noted above, NH-02 was in the “toss-up” category before Tuesday. The other NH race is still in that bucket, but things are looking brighter for Democrats.

   

   For Democrats to have any hope of keeping control of the House, they need to win almost every single one of those Democratic Toss-Up races. That’s a very tall order, but it no longer feels unachievable. According to the latest House forecast from FiveThirtyEight, Democratic candidates are leading in most of them. However, because of redistricting, Democrats need to win most of the GOP "Toss-Up” seats and a few of the “Lean” and “Likely” GOP seats. That would have seemed unimaginable a couple of months ago, but it’s no longer a crazy notion today.

4. That brings me to an interesting poll result flagged by friend of the newsletter Brian Rosenwald. Looking above, you’ll notice that AZ-02 is considered a likely GOP seat. Donald Trump won it by 7.9 points in 2020, and the Cook Partisan Voter Index considers it a + 6 GOP seat. Now granted, these numbers are from last month, and the pollster is not regarded as top quality, but this is an internal GOP poll.

   Political Polls @Politics_Polls

   #AZ02: Crane (R) 45% (+1) O'Halleran (D-inc) 44% Moore Information/@EliCraneAZ (R) Internal Poll, 400 LV, 8/11-15

   

   eliforarizona.comLatest Poll: Eli Crane Leads O’Halleran in AZ-02 - Eli Crane for CongressAugust 26th, 2022

   Usually, internal polls, when released to the public, tend to show a positive result for the party that commissioned the survey. The GOP candidate up 1 point in a seat Trump won by 8 points two years ago is not a positive result. It’s godawful (I’m kind of shocked that the Crane campaign released it). In a midterm election, the non-incumbent party should easily win a seat like this — and Crane may prevail in the end. But if Republicans are at risk of losing this seat, imagine how they are doing in toss-up races in districts that went to Biden in 2020 or that Trump narrowly won. Democrats don’t have to win AZ-02 to hold the House. They have other paths. But if they win a seat like this, it gets a lot more challenging to see how they lose the House.

5. Speaking of 538, here’s their latest House forecast.

   

   These numbers do not suggest Democrats are about to hold the House but keep in mind that two months ago, the Republicans were an 87 percent favorite to take control. A 14-point shift in two months — for the incumbent party — is not how these things usually go.